Fucking Pirates! Arrhh!

Harumph.


The e-book version of Dead Light District is available for sale on Amazon and Smashwords. You can buy your very own copy for $2.99.

Or, you can download a pirated electronic version for free!

Argh.

I found out about the pirated version a couple of weeks ago. As it happened, it was the same day I was meeting up with Paul Alves, mastermind behind the books books books website http://www.paulthebookguy.com/.

When I told Paul that I was a bit fahrklempt about my book being pirated, his reaction surprised the hell out of me. He said it was a good thing, a mark of success in a way.

As Paul put it, people aren’t pirating “Coping with Liver Spots” by Edna Schwartz or “Adventures in the Frozen Food Aisle” by Egbert Knobsplot.

Paul has a point.

However, as I’ve looked further into the pirate thing, I've gotten angrier.

Given the very nature of piracy, it’s hard to get accurate figures, but it appears that “Dead Light District” has been pirated about 40x more than it’s been purchased. That hurts. Forty times more!

It’s frustrating for me to look at the stats (pageviews, sample chapters, blogposts, etc.) and see how much activity there is around Dead Light District, and then to reconcile that with low sales. For example, on one site (and obviously I won’t say which one) there were just under 100 views in one day of the sample chapters of Dead Light District.

But there was not one single sale.

(I should mention that there have been several good reviews of the book.)

Granted, some people may have read the sample chapter and decided they were not interested in the book. That’s fine – we all have different tastes in reading. But you’d think that out of 100 there would be a small percentage, maybe 1% to 5% who wanted to keep reading and would buy the book. That’s all; just a handful of people might purchase a legal copy. If that were the case, I’d be delighted.

What seems to be happening instead though, is after reading the preview, people are downloading the whole book for free from a pirate website.  Fuck fuck fuck!

It appears that the pirated version was available within about two months of the authorized versions being available.

I have no way of knowing who made the book available to the pirate sites (and it seems that there is more than one site where the book can be downloaded for free).

I can’t do a damn thing about it. Digging through the “about us” and “contact us” sections of pirate sites eventually leads you to a post office box in Idaho. Besides, the sites are full of all sorts of disclaimers, “we are not responsible for content...”

I suppose, if I really put time and effort into it, I could maybe get XYZ pirate site to remove my book, but it would just turn up a day later somewhere else.

I recognize that piracy is inevitable, and I guess in a weird way it is a mark of success. I know I just have to suck it up. However, I wish the piracy downloads were on par with, or lower than the number of paid for downloads... not 40x more pirates!  (Keep in mind, this is the approximate number for only one pirate site - gawd knows how many times its been downloaded from other pirate sites...)

Since I apparently have to live with piracy, I wish the playing field were a little more even. Ideally, the pirates could give the creators a head start, say six months, before making pirated versions available. At least then the artist has a fair shot. I’m just saying...